"Oh, I am glad of that!" said Nora. "And so Mrs. Pomeroy really does take an interest in the girls generally?"
"Oh, yes! she has quite waked up about it, I hear through Mr. Archer. She has begun to take quite a motherly charge of them. She is very anxious that Lizzie Mason should recover; indeed she feels most unhappy about it."
"Poor Lizzie!" said Nora, with a sigh. "And how is Mr. Farrell?"
"Much the same, I believe. He is very much like a child, and seems to take no interest in money matters now. The smallest things are sufficient to amuse him. Mr. Dunlop goes to see him sometimes. He's got an idea that he may have a similar experience, and he says it's a lesson on the vanity of human things to see Farrell now, after his long struggle for riches which would be nothing to him now if he had them."
"Ah," exclaimed Aunt Margaret, "how true it is, that, as a quaint old poet says, 'We dig in dross, with mattocks made of gold'!"
"And how is Kitty?" asked Nora.
"Oh, I am always hearing her praises sung," said Roland, smiling. "According to Waldberg, there never was such a girl. She is so bright, so contented, so helpful, such a support to her poor, weak mother, in the necessary retrenchments, the going to a small house, and all that! But I am sure that her own real happiness has a good deal to do with it."
"Dear little Kitty!" said Nora. "I am glad she has come out so well. She is a good-hearted little thing, though she used to seem to me a little frivolous."
"She would have been, I'm afraid," Roland remarked, "if adversity hadn't come in time to save her."
"Ah, I see that you're something of a philosopher," remarked Mr. Blanchard. "You believe that 'Sweet are the uses of adversity.'"